I feel like I have almost nothing of an immune system, some of this I acknowledge to being diabetic, and maybe the rest to some strong voodoo. I think someone could sneeze in New Jersey and I would end up with a cold in Arizona. Anyhow, the viruses got shared at our home over Thanksgiving, everyone else gets better in 2 days, and I end up laid up for about 5 hacking and sniffling. It ain’t pretty.
But wokr still gets done, getting our online registration ready for our biggest Maricopa event coming up in January, getting our online newsletter ready for a first rollout next week, rallying some participation on next week’s NMC Online Conference in Educational Gaming.
Speaking of the NMC conference, check out the animated Larry Johnson, an eerie kind of Max Headroom experience.
Our office will be sponsoring registration in the NMC Conference for some folks at Maricopa. Over the years, we’ve tried some different ways to encourage people to “shareback” their conference experience with the rest of the system. As one example, on his own initiative, David Weaver, Physics faculty at Chandler-Gilbert, wrote up his experience of the 2003 International Conference on Thinking, as an MLX Package.
Last year, when we signed up some folks for the NMC Online Conference on Visual Literacy, we asked our Maricopa participants to post their session notes in a Wiki site. There was some success in this, but on the other hand, we heard a lot of struggling with the Wiki way (I belive there is a wiki-phobia out there), and some people we just never heard from.
For the upcoming conference on Educational gaming (Dec7-8), we are taking a different approach– we are asking each participant to create/use an account in our Maricopa ePortfolio tool, and set up an NMC Conference Blog page type, where they will record their own reflections on sessions they choose to “cover”. I am using a Wiki as a front end to this, but not asking others to do wiki editing.
Because the eport blogs have RSS, I will also whip up an aggregated view.
Wow, that was easy. Since the maricopa ePort allows you to embed RSS content, I have just started adding the feeds to my sidebar for the eport Blogs being posted by my colleagues.
Well, I’d write more but must leave for a coughing fit.
Animated Larry was just disturbing enough to be cool. They really should have dropped a layer of slowly rotating parallel lines in the background for full effect…